An Analysis of Strategic Practices in a Computer Services Company

By Carolyn Corvi, MIT, May 1988

“Another factor that had to be taken into account at this time was the rapidly diminishing time-sharing business. This problem was not unique to BCS. “General Electric sold off its failing computer manufacturing line in 1970. It seemed to be headed for another computer disaster in 1983, when its time-sharing business began to crash. When computing power became cheaper to own, nobody needed timesharing”.15 Although experts had been predicting the decline in time-sharing sales for some time, no one anticipated how quickly the market would drop off. BCS was caught in the middle. In 1983 an organization had been created to strategically place new products and services in the market. The combination of time-sharing drying up, and BCS management underestimating the length of time it would take to bring new products to market created an unexpected decline in revenues and profits.”

15. Alyssa A. Lappen, “Messenger of the gods”, Forbes, 21 March, 1988.

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Alyssa A. Lappen is a U.S.-based investigative journalist. She is the former Managing Editor at the Leeb Group (2012-2017); a former Senior Fellow of the American Center for Democracy (2005-2008); and a former Senior Editor of Institutional Investor (1993-1999), Working Woman (1991-1993) and Corporate Finance (1991). She served six of her 12 years at Forbes (1978-1990) as an Associate Editor. Ms. Lappen was also a staff reporter at The New Haven Register (1975-1977). During a decade as a freelance, her work appeared in Big Peace, Pajamas Media, Front Page Magazine, American Thinker, Right Side News, Family Security Matters, the Washington Times and many other Internet and print journals. Ms. Lappen also contributed to the Terror Finance Blog, among others. She supports the right of journalists worldwide to write without fear or restriction on politics, governments, international affairs, terrorism, terror financing and religious support for terrorism, among other subjects. Ms. Lappen is also an accomplished poet. Her first full-length collection, The Minstrel's Song, was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in April 2015. Her poems have been published in the 2nd 2007 edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and both 2007 issues of Wales' award-winning Seventh Quarry: Swansea Poetry Magazine. Dozens of her poems have appeared in print and online literary journals and books. She won the 2000 annual Ruah: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry chapbook award and has received a Harvard Summer Poetry Prize and several honorable mentions.

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